Subscribe to this blog

Subscribe to our free newsletter

FEATURED POST

The violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville reflects the dangerous, open-the-floodgates culture that having a Bully-in-Chief in the White House has created in America.
Hundreds of protesters descended upon Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017 for a “Unite the Right” rally.
The rally was dispersed by police minutes after its scheduled start at noon, after clashes between rallygoers and counter-protesters, and after a torchlit pre-rally march Friday night descended into violence.
But later that day, as rallygoers began a march and counterprotests continued, a reported Nazi sympathizer drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19.
Self-described “pro-white” activist Jason Kessler organized the rally to protest the planned removal of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park in Charlottesville.
Kessler is affiliated with the alt-right movement that uses internet trolling tactics to argue against diversity and “identity po…

Let's Not Twist It. My Differences with Scalia Were More Than "Political"

I opened a giant wooden door that separated the West Courtroom of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals from the bare hallway that connected the room to the fresh outside air. A small man with a patchy beard waited nervously to the right. He looked like a kid wanting an autograph from his favorite quarterback. He was a representative of the Texas Attorney General’s Office. He was waiting for my colleague and mentor.

We’d just finished arguments in front of a panel of the Fifth Circuit. A few minutes prior, my mentor had argued that we were in front of the court to talk about the “most egregious violation of the sixth amendment in American history.” It was a bold claim, of course. The kind of claim that a skilled appellate litigator would always avoid if it wasn’t true. I thought that it was. Our client spent three decades in a Texas prison without a valid conviction or sentence. His case had been overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest state criminal court in Texas. The district attorney’s office that had once sentenced him to death had been ordered by the high court to either release our client or re-try him. They chose the third rail, to just leave him in prison without doing a thing. He was a black man with a documented IQ of somewhere between 55 and 65. In layman’s terms, that made him intellectually disabled or “mentally retarded.”

My mentor argued that because the State failed to try our client over the three decades that he was in jail, the State had violated his speedy trial rights. The little man with the teenage beard argued that it wasn’t the State’s fault. He argued that our client, who was barely lucid enough to know how to tie his shoes, should somehow bring himself to trial, even though he was behind bars in the Texas penitentiary. The little man with the teenage beard argued, in the alternative, that the federal court there did not have jurisdiction to decide on the case at that time because of arcane procedural reasons that only very skilled federal appellate litigators would understand. His argument could be boiled down to a very simple stew—we didn’t do anything wrong, and even if we did, you should let the State of Texas kick this case around for two more years before we end up back in this exact same court to answer the question of whether this man’s speedy trial rights were violated.

It was all very civilized. Men in suits speaking into microphones that sent noise to men and women sitting in robes behind nice antique furniture. Others were there to argue cases that didn’t resemble ours. Some looked up from their own notes when they heard my mentor speak of the gravity of the case before us.

After we’d argued, our team exchanged the usual pleasantries.

“I appreciate you flying down here to support us,” my mentor said. I assured him that the soft poker at nearby Harrah’s was as much a draw as lending my support to our client. We were all smiles. Then there was the little man with the teenage beard. He wanted to talk so badly.

My mentor acknowledged him. The little man began to speak.

“I think I worked with a professor who now works with you at the Law Center,” he said to my mentor, referring to my alma mater in Houston.

My mentor was gracious. He’s the author of books about the death penalty. He’s secured exonerations of a handful of innocent men. He’s given a speech at the TED conference. He’s the sort of man that anyone in our field would want to meet and greet. He talked with the little man for a few seconds. I couldn’t bring myself to join in the pleasantries. I commented that my mentor was twice the man I was for even entertaining the conversation. My mentor had already been through the wars. He’d been taking on Capitol Mutts for so long that dealing nicely with another one was as natural as a politician shaking hands at a rally.

I realized something in that moment. Something beyond the fact that my mentor was immensely better than me at work and life. I realized that the differences between me and the little man with the teenage beard weren’t the sort of differences that could be bridged with a handshake and a short exchange of small talk.

When I stripped away all of the bullshit, he had been arguing to keep my mentally retarded black client in prison despite a gross violation of that man’s civil rights. Our client had been abused by the State for decades. When his case was overturned by the high appellate court, it was joined by two cousin cases where those gentlemen also received outright overturns of their death penalty cases. One of those men was black. The other was white. The black man was re-tried by the State. He was convicted a second time, and he was sentenced to death. He had since been executed by lethal injection, poison pumped into his veins until he died on the gurney like a dog. The other man, the white man, had his sentence properly commuted under the law. He was paroled in the 1990s, left to live out his years with his family. Our client had been left to rot in a prison cell despite a legal right to a new trial.

It wasn’t a game. Our differences were not small, not political. The little man with the teenage beard had ostensibly spent the weeks before the oral argument planning creative ways to keep our client in prison a little bit longer. He’d been looking for ways to work around the sixth amendment rights that our client was due as a human. In the first few minutes I knew him, when he spoke to the judges of the Fifth Circuit, he’d spun himself into knots not arguing for mundane political advances, but for the continuance of Texas’s keeping a man in a cage. The consequences of our sides were real. They came down right on the disabled head of our client.

That leads me to Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who died the day before Valentine’s Day in 2016. In the wake of Scalia’s death, opinions flowed over in my field. They flowed, too, from the average Joe not in my field. People who think like I do were just as gracious as my mentor had been to the little man with the teenage beard. They did that for two reasons. For one, they’re better than me. Perhaps most importantly, they did so because they had to.

Hilary Clinton said in a statement:

“My thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Justice Scalia as they mourn his sudden passing,” she said. “I did not hold Justice Scalia’s views, but he was a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

Bernie Sanders offered:

”While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

California Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote:

"In his three decades on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia left a lasting impression on American jurisprudence. Even those of us who vigorously disagreed with his views recognized the power of his intellect."

Avowed death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean wrote:

“I'm very saddened to hear about the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Although we didn't always agree, we were both Christians and were united on those essential principles. My thoughts and prayers are with Justice Scalia and his family.”

Even President Obama offered his thoughts on the value of Scalia’s “service” to the public. I have immense respect for the people that offered these opinions. I have even more respect for the pressures that made them contribute to needless hagiography rather than telling the truth. There’s no reason to make margaritas in celebration of Scalia’s death. Celebrated civil rights lawyer Clarence Darrow once said, “All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” His is my sentiment. I disagree strongly with anyone who frames differences with Scalia as “political” ones. It’s reductionist and revisionist, reducing important moral imperatives down to little more than questions that could be resolved in many ways. The problems with Scalia were bigger than that.

The Constitution of the United States is not a legal document. The people who interpret it are making legal distinctions off of the document, and the people who argue using it are making legal arguments based upon it. But it is not a legal document. It’s a moral document. It’s a founding principle that gives equal rights to all men, regardless of race, religion, class or station. It’s a document that understood how important it was to protect certain moral truths from the whims of politics. The Sixth Amendment exists because the founders recognized that a fair trial wasn’t something to be left to voters, who are prone to getting things very wrong a few times before they get things right. The Fifth Amendment is there because the right of non-incrimination shouldn’t be left to a guy who just discovered the criminal justice system when he stumbled upon Making a Murderer just before Christmas. That anyone believes they have “political” differences with Antonin Scalia is proof enough that his visage is worth truthful dissection.

I differed most with Scalia on the death penalty and the treatment of condemned people. Today, I’ve watched as fellow criminal defenders have posted pictures of the justice, and even as some lamented the harsh treatment of the justice. One broke down her opinions as a mere “disagreement” on ideological grounds. She acted as if her and Scalia agreed on the importance of educating our children, but disagreed on the proper way to do it. That’s a political disagreement. With Scalia, it’s much deeper than that.

I’m friends with Anthony Graves, the 12th man ever exonerated off of death row in Texas, the 138th exonerated nationally. He’s a black man who was sentenced to death for a mass child murder that he knew nothing about, only after prosecutors hid evidence, coerced witnesses, and manipulated the jury in the media. He was exonerated only after 18 years in custody. He suffered immensely, enduring solitary confinement, missing out on birthdays, Christmas mornings, and Easter egg hunts with his children. That he’s now out and using his voice to change the world does not make up for the wrong that was done to him. My friend petitioned the Supreme Court to take up his case after his appeals were denied in state court and the lower levels of the federal system. As in most death penalty cases, the Supreme Court declined to take up my friend’s case. Antonin Scalia left my friend to die. He didn’t care.

And why would he? Scalia once famously declared:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

For the uninitiated, the justice was saying, in effect, that the constitution is no barrier to executing a man who is actually innocent so long as that death sentence has been obtained in a nominally “legal” manner. He had other death penalty opinions that stood out, too. In 1994, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an opinion questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty. Scalia responded by picking out what he perceived to be the worst of worst in death penalty cases. He picked Henry Lee McCollum, writing that McCollum’s case was a great example of why the death penalty was still necessary. He wrote:

“For example, the case of an 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!”

Henry McCollum is exonerated by DNA evidence after 3 decades on death row.

McCollum walked off of death row in 2015 after DNA evidence proved his innocence. So much for Scalia’s model case. You see, Scalia was prone to pronouncements that amounted to little more than demagoguery. His statements contributed to decades of operation of the machinery of death, which took lives in brutal state-sponsored murder.

Of course he didn’t stop at the death penalty. He dissented in Lawrence v. Texas, standing short in his belief that states should be allowed to jail gay people for having sex. His most recent headlines came when he suggested in an affirmative action case that black men might be better off at “less advanced schools,” where they might do better.

To cloak these moral distinctions as “political differences” is disingenuous. It’s the sort of stuff that will allow an Antonin Scalia monument to be erected somewhere in honor of his “passion” or “service” in the decades to come, as the younger public is duped into believing that his opinions were just the product of a different kind of legal reasoning. Since when did adjectives like “passionate” become a good thing without context? A man who is passionate about causing pain isn’t one to celebrate. In fact, it would have been better if he’d pursued his agenda with far less passion. The “service” of a man who dedicated his career to marginalizing the already marginalized is not a service we should honor. That man would have been better off choosing a high-dollar law firm, where he could have marshaled his considerable legal skills in favor of money before running himself into the ground.

Death does not wash away the stench of planned cruelty. Scalia holds more moral responsibility for his decisions than the average villain. His weren’t in-the-moment mistakes made under pressure. They were calculated judgments made after hours, days, and weeks of reflection. They were opinions written with the greatest of care.

To reduce these opinions, and these differences to the unmoving label of “political” does a disservice to the pain his decisions brought to actual human beings. Like the little man with the teenage beard, Scalia’s actions weren’t without a victim. When he wrote of the death penalty, he directly weighed on my friend Anthony and plenty of others, too. When he ruled in Lawrence, he laid the groundwork for much of the hate that’s made assaults on gay men and women a thing that we must tackle in 2016. If you call these political differences, as if they’re just different methods of solving a problem, you demonstrate a stunning lack of understanding that when Antonin Scalia spoke and wrote, his words carried unique power that often led to death, added to prejudice, and threatened to set America back a hundred years.

When I heard about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death, I didn't feign sadness. My reaction was too inconsiderate to repeat here, but like many people the justice spent his life trying to suppress — namely women and LGBT people — I shed a tear, but it wasn't one of sadness.

Losing Scalia is one step toward moving past our country’s homophobic and sexist past. It means we’re nearer to a world where people like him aren’t keeping down people like me. So I don’t know why it’s impolite to be happy.

The Facebook post that informed me of Scalia’s passing was filled with careful acknowledgements: “Whoa.” “Holy shit. “He spent his life interpreting the Constitution.”

Displeased with a lack of honesty about the man, I chimed in with "Yesyesyes." I was immediately slammed for my response — called "classless" and "piggish," and told I should be "ashamed" of myself. That's funny — those words are strikingly similar to things Scalia has written about me, my partner, and every LGBT person in the country.

"Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as ‘discrimination’ which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously ‘mainstream.’”

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

Waves of executions are part of Indonesian President Joko Widodo's hard line on drug convicts. Australians best remember those of Bali Nine leaders Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, shot by firing squad in 2015 despite all efforts to save them. With more than 200 people on death row, why do anti-death penalty activists now see a ray of hope?
IN A SMALL Christian prayer room at Cilacap jail, on central Java’s south coast, a death-row prisoner talks diffidently about her wedding dress.
The Indonesian migrant worker and convicted drug dealer was once married to an abusive husband but separated long ago after he shunted her off to work in Taiwan.
Merri Utami had planned to wear her new white dress, not to second nuptials, but to her execution by firing squad last year.
She had been preparing to meet Jesus.
According to Indonesian protocol, she would be tied to a stake in a remote jungle clearing on Nusakambangan penal island off the port town of Cilacap, blindfolded and shot dead in t…

WEST PALM BEACH -- In a ruling that could prevent as many as 100 condemned inmates from seeking life sentences, the Florida Supreme Court this week rejected arguments that constitutional flaws with the state’s death penalty should benefit all 362 inmates on death row.
The much anticipated ruling strikes a blow to efforts to block the scheduled Aug. 24 execution of Mark James Asay for the 1987 shooting deaths of two Jacksonville men. It also will make it more difficult for all but one of seven men on death row for decades-old Palm Beach County murders to win life sentences as a result of the legal turmoil roiling the state’s death penalty.
While acknowledging that Asay and others may have other grounds to appeal their death sentences, the ruling is both far-reaching and troubling, said Robert Dunham, a lawyer and executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
“Now what you have is a situation in which for about 200 cases there may be costly resentencings …

The terrorist group known as ISIS has released pictures of a man being thrown off a roof in Syria.
Thousands of LGBT people have been displaced in Iraq and Syria, as the terrorist group known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) continues to actively target and execute gay men.
This week, the group’s propaganda agency released three pictures of a man being executed for suspected homosexuality.
The pictures were identified as being taken in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, though differing reports identify the location as Damascus.
The first photo shows the man being dangled from the top of a high building by three assailants.
The second pictures shows the man after he has been pushed off the ledge, plunging to his death.
In the third picture, his bloodied body is shown on the ground, as the crowd jeers and pelts him with stones.
Other pictures released by the propaganda agency show the enforcement of horrific brutal practices, including amputating the arm of a thief. Pictures also…

France condemns the execution in Iran, on August 10, of Alireza Tajiki, a minor at the time of the events and at the time of his sentencing, and expresses its concerns about reports of the imminent execution of Mehdi Bohlouli, also sentenced to death when he was a juvenile.
This execution is contrary to the international commitments that Iran itself has signed on to, particularly the international Convention on the Rights of the Child.
It is also a step backward with respect to the positive developments we have seen on human rights in Iran, most notably the Iranian Parliament’s adoption of a law on August 13 limiting the scope of the death penalty.
France reiterates its unwavering opposition to the death penalty throughout the world and in all circumstances.
It encourages Iran to continue its efforts and to establish a moratorium with a view to its abolition. Source: France Diplomatie, August 16, 2017

Rejecting international norms, Iran speeds the execution of minor offenders
On Tue…

One of the prisoners was 17 when he committed the alleged "crime"
Seven prisoners sentenced to death in Gohar Dasht (Rajaieh Shahr) Prison in Karaj, have been transferred to solitary confinement. These victims are faced with an imminent death threat.
Mehdi Bohlouli, who is now on the verge of execution after serving 15 years of imprisonment, was only 17 when arrested and this is the fourth time he has been transferred to solitary confinement for implementation of the death sentence.
Taking prisoners to the gallows to witness the shocking scene of the execution of other prisoners is a common practice of torture in the prisons of Iranian regime.
Transferring the young prisoner, Mehdi Bohlouli for execution is taking place while the execution of Alireza Tajiki, a young prisoner who was 15 years old at the time of his arrest, sparked a wave of hatred inside and outside of Iran, and international human rights organizations called it shameful and shocking. Alireza Tajiki was hang…

Jakarta: Bali nine drug mule Renae Lawrence is expected to have her jail sentence cut by six months which would see her complete her prison term by the middle of next year.
However it is likely she will serve an additional six months behind bars rather than pay the one billion rupiah ($100,000) fine that accompanied her jail sentence.
The prison governor of Bangli jail, Diding Alfian, told Fairfax Media that Lawrence had been recommended for a six-month remission as part of Indonesian Independence Day celebrations on August 17.
Meanwhile Bali authorities said Australian fugitive Shaun Edward Davidson could have been a free man on Thursday if he had been granted a sentence remission.
Davidson escaped from Kerobokan jail via a waste tunnel in late June with just 10 weeks left of his 12-month jail sentence for using another man's passport.
"He was in for forged documents, we would have recommended him for remission if he behaved," Bali Corrections Chief Surung Pasaribu tol…

A prisoner was reportedly hanged at Shirvan Prison on murder charges. 2 prisoners were reportedly hanged at Zanjan Central Prison on drug related charges.
According to close sources, the executions in Zanjan were carried out on the morning of Tuesday August 8, and the prisoners have been identified as: Hamza Rahimpour and Abbas Sooghi.
"Hamza Rahimpour was arrested and sentenced to death in 2014 on the charge of producing and selling 6 kilograms of crystal meth. Abbas Sooghi was arrested and sentenced to death in 2015 on the charge of four kilograms of opium and heroin," an informed source tells Iran Human Rights.
Iran Human Rights had reported on the imminent execution of these prisoners and urged the international community to take action.
An official Iranian source announced on Monday August 7 the execution of a prisoner at Zanjan Central Prison on murder charges. This brings the total number of prisoners who were reported as executed in Zanjan Prison last week to three. …

NCRI - Two young 20- and 19-year-old prisoners from Afghanistan were sentenced to death in central prison of Zahedan, Southeast Iran, on the charges of armed robbery from a financial institution.
According to reports, they were subjected to intense physical and mental torture in the prison, in order to confess to what they were asked to in front of the television camera.
Hamza Noorzehi, 20, and Amir Noorzehi, 19, were arrested in Zahedan on 28 July 2014.
According to reports, Hamza Noorzehi was working in a quilt shop and Amir Noorzehi was working on the street repairing and waxing shoes when Fereshtegan (Angels) Financial Institute, also known as Arman Institution, was targeted by an armed robbery.
According to their relatives, they had nothing to do with the armed robbery, and they were only working on their daily routine work.
At the time of arrest, Hamza Noorzehi, was 17 and Amir Noorzehi was 16 years old.
The Angels aka Arman financial institution was based in the city of Zahed…

The amendment will apply retroactively, thus commuting the sentences for many of the 5,300 inmates currently on death row for drug trafficking. Under the new bill, the punishment for those already convicted and given the death penalty or life in prison, other than those meeting the new execution requirements, will be commuted to up to 30 years in jail and a cash fine.
Iran’s parliament passed a long-awaited amendment to its drug trafficking laws on Sunday, raising the thresholds that can trigger capital punishment and potentially saving the lives of many on death row.
The bill must still be approved by the conservative-dominated Guardian Council but gained parliamentary approval after months of debate, according to parliament’s website and the ISNA news agency.
According to rights group Amnesty International, Iran was one of the top five executioners in the world in 2016, with most of its hangings related to illicit drugs. The watchdog noted sharp drops in the number of executions in …

I oppose the death penalty in all cases, unconditionally, regardless of the method chosen to kill the condemned prisoner.
The death penalty is inherently cruel and degrading, an archaic punishment that is incompatible with human dignity.
To end the death penalty is to abandon a destructive diversionary and divisive public policy that is not consistent with widely held values.
The death penalty not only runs the risk of irrevocable error, it is also costly to the public purse as well as in social and psychological terms.
The death penalty has not been proved to have a special deterrent effect.
It tends to be applied in a discriminatory way on grounds of race and class.
It denies the possibility of reconciliation and rehabilitation.
It prolongs the suffering of the murder victim's family and extends that suffering to the loved ones of the condemned prisoner.
It diverts resources that could be better used to work against violent crime and assist those affected by it.
Death Penalty News is a privately owned, non-profit blog. It is based in Paris, France.
Your donations to Death Penalty News DO make a difference.